Bernard The Idea of Atlantic History
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III For scholarship has its own internal dynamics. The inductive elaboration of research in specific subjects that has no other purpose than its own fulfillment—is in no way an epiphenomenon reflecting something more determinative than itself—is an independent creative force. In these years the interior impulses and logic of scholarship were leading in directions congruent with and supportive of the post-war political perspectives that had initially given the idea of “Atlantic” phenomena its aura of sophistication. This was part of a more general development. In several different areas the constant enrichment of historical research, the propulsions of inquiry, during years of immense expansion in the academic world and an unprecedented amount of international communication and interaction among scholars, led to a re-scaling of perspective in which the basic unit of discussion was larger than any of the traditional units within which the research began. Simply by the force of scholarship itself, what I have elsewhere called large-scale spatial orbits developing through time were becoming visible as they had not been before, and within them patterns of filiation and derivation.17 The major locus for such fructifying research lay in the area of Atlantic history. Before the decade was out Pierre Chaunu, embarking alone on a four-volume interpretation of the seven volumes of data he and Huguette Chaunu had published in their Séville et l'Atlantique, was moved to contemplate not simply Seville's Atlantic commerce in all its aspects but “the history of an ocean.” Analyzing his mountains of documents and statistics, he wrote that the Atlantic was the first ocean—as opposed to Braudel's inland sea—“to have been regularly crossed, the first to find itself at the heart of an economy, indeed of a civilization, diverse, complex, multiple ... yet essentially one.” Humbling himself before, while attempting to distance himself from, the apparently unapproachable perfection of Braudel's Méditerranée, Chaunu plunged with incredible energy into his 4,102-page interpretation of Ibero-Atlantic civilization, a sequel to his and Huguette Chaunu's preceding 3,880 pages of data. He organized his four volumes in terms of the Annalists' “structures et conjoncture,” analyzing in two volumes the constituent elements, then in the final two volumes the movement of things—the modifications, variables, gradients, and speed. “Space” in these volumes, he wrote, was “sacrificed to time.” The result was a prodigious panorama—its outline often lost in the sheer immensity of detail—of an Ibero-American world: not only the two continents in their interaction but the involvements of their “archipelagos” (outlying islands, east and west) as well. Neither altogether shapeless (“aplastante”) as one critic said (though it is monstrously verbose, repetitious, and self-indulgent) nor one of “the historical masterpieces of its century,” Chaunu's “history of the Atlantic as a trading area during the hegemony of Spain” undoubtedly focused on the Atlantic “in such a way as to make possible a fresh and immensely rewarding look at reality.”18 While Chaunu was completing his titanic oeuvre, other important lines of historical scholarship were developing independently, which added substantial detail to the historical concept of an integrated, cohesive Atlantic world. Developments in demographic history, originating in France in the 1950s, then spreading to England and to the United States, spilled over naturally into migration studies that added a new dimension to Atlantic studies. Greatly aided by computers—liberated by computers—and by the statistical techniques of the economists, historians began a new wave of logically developing research into trans-Atlantic population movements that had remarkable results. For the first time they could count, or at least estimate in a persuasive way, the numbers of people in the pre-industrial, pre-statistical era who left the Old World for settlement in the New. The numbers proved to be unexpected, in some cases quite remarkable: c.400,000 British to the Caribbean and the North American colonies in the seventeenth century (when the total population of England and Wales was less than 6 million), c.300,000 in the eighteenth century. From various German principalities in the eighteenth century approximately 111,000 were found to have migrated to the trans-oceanic west, and something like the same number came in the same years from Ireland. The figures for Spain were smaller, relative to the size of the home population—approximately 437,000 from 1500 to 1650—and the French, with the largest domestic population, may have sent over 67,000 to Quebec of whom 70 percent returned to France.19 The mere establishment of such migration figures was important and intriguing in itself, but that was only the beginning of a developing inquiry, and not the most interesting part. Questions followed, logically and naturally, once these figures were in place. Why did these people migrate in such numbers? Where had they come from? What drove them out or enticed them over? What kind of people were they? What baggage, cultural and material, did they bring with them? There were no obvious answers, and the attempt to find them led, by an ever-expanding interior dynamic, to even deeper and more puzzling and interesting questions, all of which spanned the Atlantic world and drew it together. That half a million Germans, mainly Protestant, fled from the Palatinate, ruled in the later seventeenth century by reactionary princes, and from elsewhere in southwestern Germany, northern Switzerland, and southeastern France seeking refuge in more tolerant communities—that was no mystery. Nor were the decisions of the majority of that diaspora mysterious. They did the rational thing, and moved off a few hundred miles northeast to Protestant Prussia, which was trying to populate the Ostmark, or sailed down the Danube into Hapsburg lands where they were promised some degree of security. What was mysterious is why 100,000 of them did the irrational thing and undertook a grim trip down the Rhine where they had to pass through some 40 tolls and barriers, to end up impoverished in Rotterdam, where they waited under difficult conditions, every passing day reducing their resources, until they could get passage to Southampton or Cowes. Once at those English transit points they again had long delays under even worse conditions, and then risked their lives on a 3,000-mile ocean voyage in vessels little better than coastal schooners. Why did they do this, especially after the miseries of this enterprise became notorious in the villages of the Palatinate?20 Similarly, what was one to make of the tens of thousands of workers from all over England—farm hands as well as artisans—funneling through London and Bristol to accept degrading contracts to work in the hot tobacco fields of the Chesapeake colonies under conditions that were well known to be at best difficult, most often miserable, at times fatal? And why do the Irish migration figures, in the early eighteenth century, bunch at decennial points? What happened at those ten-year intervals to intensify the out-migration?21 Such questions were intriguing; they developed from earlier questions and answers, and they had their own intrinsic interest. Answers to them did not serve any greater purpose than to satisfy one's curiosity and resolve certain nagging anomalies; but once answered, they led to a broadening understanding of the Atlantic world as an integrated human community. For, from such research, moving by its own impulses, it became clear that one could understand the magnitudes and character of trans-Atlantic migration only by examining both, on the one hand, domestic mobility at home and also, on the other, population conditions in the Western Hemisphere. It was all one vast unit. Thus, in the research for Voyagers to the West, I found that the migration flow from England in the late eighteenth century was not a singular phenomenon: it was a dual migration, shaped by conditions in two areas of Britain that differed radically on a dozen variables that could clearly be distinguished by computer analysis. To jumble them together not only distorted one's understanding of the migration itself but also precluded understanding the differential fortunes of the migrants once they arrived in America.22 Similarly, Leslie Choquette has recently explained more of the French-Atlantic migrations than we have ever known before by examining, not the migrations themselves, but rather, in great detail, the social and demographic conditions that prevailed in certain regions and villages of France, some of them coastal catchment areas for uprooted people, some remote, traditional, tightly cohesive communities far from the main routes of human traffic. Her exhaustive study, which developed logically from an initial numerical analysis, proves the French emigration to have been “essentially a modern movement,” with two-thirds of the migrants drawn from the towns and cities of a country whose population was 85 percent rural. And those who were of rural origins came from “regions that were well integrated into market economies, and where agriculture was incipiently capitalist.” The implications are quite startling. Eugen Weber, in his Peasants into Frenchmen, demonstrated the growing modernity of ordinary Frenchmen. But Choquette, in her Frenchmen into Peasants, shows the opposite: the French Atlantic migration was a process of urban Frenchmen turning into peasants as they settled into the Canadian land; and from that fact flows a new understanding of Canadian as well as French demographic history. And what we know now about the migrants to Spanish America—much more than was known before but still not enough—has been explained by similar close analysis of the major regions of Spain, and by analysis of linguistic differences in Spain region by region.23 As such research progressed, independently of political or other external pressures, the unitary character of the entire Atlantic world became increasingly clear. One of the recent works on German domestic migration explains in detail the existence of obscure German settlements in a remote corner of the present American state of Georgia in the early eighteenth century as an incidental consequence of the decisions of the reactionary Archbishop of Salzburg to expel the evangelicals from that deeply provincial, mountainous mining region. So the famous Archepiscopacy of Salzburg, soon to be the scene of Mozart's triumphs and trials, and the obscure, primitive, frontier evangelical village of Ebenezer, Georgia, are part of the same story.24 But there is a deeper dimension to the realization that domestic and trans-Atlantic migrations were part of a single whole. It has now become clear, through intensifying research, that the whole Atlantic world in the pre-industrial period formed a single vast labor market. It was an inefficient labor market, to be sure, inelastic in its operation; it was regionalized and segmented by mercantilist blockages, and it stumbled through periods of glut and scarcity that could not be controlled. But we now know that in important respects it was, nevertheless, a single functional unit. Thus the phases of the trans-Atlantic emigration of English indentured servants correlate statistically with increases and decreases in the price of tobacco produced in the Chesapeake colonies and the fluctuations in real wages in England. When in the seventeenth century tobacco prices rose in the English and continental European tobacco markets, production expanded in plantations 3,000 miles away, new areas of cultivation were opened up, and the need for plantation labor increased accordingly. The most recent volume of essays on the subject is called, pointedly, Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World. It deals with labor on the Caribbean frontier and northwest Mexico, with vagrancy in Britain and the Cape Colony, and with workers' migrations and rebellions in Brazil; but its emphasis is on slavery. For it is the slave system, in all its vast ramifications, that dominated the eighteenth-century American labor markets.25 The present, technical discussion of Atlantic slavery has reached a degree of sophistication appropriate for that enormous, endlessly tragic and endlessly consequential story. And as it has developed in the past quarter-century—with book after book exploring more and more of the details—it has brought disparate worlds increasingly together into a single Atlantic entity. A group of extremely ingenious historians and anthropologists—among them Philip Curtin, Paul Lovejoy, Joseph Miller, Patrick Manning, Martin Klein, and Pieter Emmer, some of whose work is summarized in two important collections of essays: The Uncommon Market and Slavery and the Atlantic System—have explored the African sources of American slavery (its demographic, cultural, and economic roots in that continent) which they and others, like Stuart Schwartz, have related to conditions in the Americas. One can now see how villages deep in equatorial Africa came together with plantations in remote parts of Brazil, the Caribbean islands, and up-country South Carolina. It is not simply that uni-national studies, like Joseph Miller's magisterial book on the Portuguese slave trade, have followed out every link in the great chain that joined Africa and America. More than that: slavery in the entire Atlantic basin—that huge pan-oceanic oval which included large parts of two continents—has been viewed comprehensively as a single “system,” fundamental to the whole of Atlantic commerce. It was slavery, according to Barbara Solow's introduction to Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, that made the empty lands of the western hemisphere valuable producers of commodities and valuable markets for Europe and North America: What moved in the Atlantic in these centuries was predominantly slaves, the output of slaves, the inputs of slave societies, and the goods and services purchased with the earnings on slave products. ... Slavery thus affected not only the countries of the slaves' origins and destinations but, equally, those countries that invested in, supplied, or consumed the products of the slave economies. And most recently the entire subject has been elevated to a new plane of comprehension and detail by the publication, in electronic form, of a vast slave trade database, a compilation by an international team of scholars of some 27,000 Atlantic slave voyages—two-thirds of the estimated total—with information on slave origins and destinations, aggregate characteristics of the slaves carried, and details of the conditions and fortunes of the voyages.26 Slavery and the labor market were only one part, though a major part, of a general Atlantic commercial system, the inter-dependence of whose elements has, since the 1950s, become increasingly clear. For Atlantic trade in the ancien régime, despite all the distances involved, was not an impersonal mechanism whose managers manipulated numbers and other symbols abstracted from real people and things. It can be seen as a human community that lived close to the production and distribution of the goods it managed. Early in this new phase of historical writing it became clear, for example, that the merchants of seventeenth-century New England were dependent for their profits not on a stable triangular trade but on an unstable, flexible, multilateral geometry of trade that shifted in such unpredictable ways, depending on the vagaries of local gluts and dearths, that success required marketing agents of extreme reliability and skill. As a consequence New England's earliest trading network throughout the Atlantic basin became a kinship network, as merchant families sent out the people they could best trust—sons and loyal in-laws—to man the families' trade in England, Ireland, the Wine Islands, the Caribbean, and the southern mainland colonies. And what family ties did for the New England families, religious affiliations did for Pennsylvania's Quaker merchants. Their co-religionists spread out through the Atlantic ports to manage the trade from and to Philadelphia. Young sons of trading families everywhere—in England as in Spain, in the Netherlands as in France—were sent abroad to learn the business at various locations throughout the Atlantic basin, to meet the people they would later have to deal with, and to pick up what they could of the most modern techniques of commerce.27 The emphasis on the human, individual, entrepreneurial aspects of commerce has cast new light on old problems in the linkages within the Atlantic system. By examining not the structure of the commercial-political organization of the Dutch West India Company but the people who devised those institutions and controlled them, Oliver Rink found that the failure of the Company, which had tentacles throughout the Caribbean and reached into North and South America, did not mean the failure of the major players in the Company. They knew how to exploit the company, how to circumvent its problems and continue to profit as individuals. Those who had presided over the Company's incompetence and bankruptcy in New Netherland not only continued to profit as individual traders in the Company's once-monopolized territory but made deals with the English when New Netherland became New York and continued to trade there profitably for years thereafter.28 As the years passed and trade grew more elaborate in the eighteenth century, involving more and more commodities, reaching deeper and deeper into the myriad markets, public and private, in what Ralph Davis called The Rise of the Atlantic Economies, the complexity of the merchant networks grew until they reached the point of refinement that has been described and analyzed by David Hancock. In his Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, Hancock examined in remarkable detail the entrepreneurial and social lives of a group of 23 Anglo-Scottish merchants who rose from obscurity to affluence in the mid-eighteenth century. They dealt in slaves, in Florida plantations, in sugar, tobacco, timber, and provisions; they supplied bread to the British army in Germany during the Seven Years War, and ultimately became bankers, British estate owners, and art collectors. The key to all their varied activities was their integration. Debts incurred in opening plantations in Florida were liquidated by profits in the slave markets in Africa; huge profits from bread contracts were invested in land deals in South Carolina and the Caribbean; funds derived from sugar production and marketing provided capital for commercial loans. Hancock's 23 principals, located primarily in London, had affiliates in Scotland, Bance Island (off the coast of Africa), Madeira and the Azores, the West Indies, Florida, Germany, and the Low Countries. As they calculated profits and losses, opportunities and problems, they cast their minds broadly across the whole Atlantic world, viewing, as had their predecessors for almost a century, Britain's own domain as a single great arc sweeping north, west, and south—from Britain, to Ireland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New England and the Atlantic coastal lands south to Florida, Jamaica and the Leeward and Windward Islands, finally back eastward via the Azores to their African slaving station on Bance island.29 The distances—the geographical ramifications—of the Atlantic trading system were enormous. One of the first in Professor Jacob Price's stream of excellent studies of the Atlantic tobacco trade, which linked North America to Britain, France, and central Europe via Dutch middlemen, traced the negotiations at the end of the seventeenth century for the marketing of Virginia tobacco in the territories ruled by Peter the Great. The so-called Tobacco Adventure to Russia, launched by a syndicate of English and Russian merchants and diplomats, failed at the last moment because of incompetence and greed, but one cannot help speculating what the consequences would have been if, as was likely, it had succeeded. If tobacco production in America had risen to satisfy directly the potential Russian market there would have been a huge expansion of cultivation, great pressure on the labor supply which would have intensified population movements, and soaring profits for American planters and English middlemen. The fates of merchants, farmers, servants, and slaves in the tobacco-producing lands of the Western Hemisphere would thereafter have been intimately tied to the habits of tobacco smokers in the Russian cities, towns, and country estates.30 But even without the Russian tobacco contract, west and east were drawn together in this line of trade as in others. Rice producers and merchants in South Carolina, like sugar producers in Barbados and Jamaica, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and like fishermen in Newfoundland, New England, and Nova Scotia, have been shown to have searched for possible markets throughout the Atlantic basin, and, despite the restrictions imposed by mercantilist regulations, to have reached into every available corner of that developing world, legally or illegally. It is the “Atlantic” dimension of the early modern economic history of the Western world that seems now to illuminate the most local, provincial developments, whether in La Rochelle, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, in Bristol, England, or in a variety of West Indian and Latin American port towns.31 The centripetal forces at work in the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century were not, however, restricted to demography, the labor markets, and commerce. One of the major developments in the historiography of the Atlantic world in the ancien régime over the past generation—impelled by the inner forces of scholarship itself, by the curiosity aroused by newly gathered information and new questions generated dialectically by answers to old questions—has been a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of Atlantic politics. Politics, that is, not government. As I said earlier, the formal institutional structures of government in the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires of that era have long been known—and indeed studies like Magali Sarfatti's Spanish Bureaucratic-Patrimonialism in America (1966) transcended the descriptive limitations of Haring's and Andrews' generation, to consider the sociological characteristics of Spanish-American governance. But for reasons that lay deep in historical thinking in the 1960s one felt the necessity to go beyond institutions to the people who controlled these structures, who exploited them, and made them work—beyond the structure of power, in other words, to the uses of power and the competition of individuals and groups for the benefits of power. And as that subject—politics—emerged with its own structure, there was revealed a mass of intricate connections throughout the Atlantic world which had not been seen before.32 Imperial Spain governed its American domain by sending to the colonies governors, judges, higher clerics, and other officials, mandating their regular return to Spain, and, in the early years, limiting the access of American-born (creole) elites to high office. Competition for offices in America was a significant part of politics in Spain; there was always a sizeable and important group of Spanish officials whose careers were intimately associated with the Western Hemisphere. But systematic, legitimate, adversarial politics remained rudimentary in Spain's colonies. For power, centered in Spain and radiating out into the American provinces, remained in the hands either of the revolving cadres of peninsular Spanish officeholders or of creole elites who bought their way into the imperial bureaucracy or were conceded local authority before the Bourbon reforms. These local American leaders, few in number relative to the politically inert mass population of natives and mixed-blood castas they ruled, unsure of their identity, sought both to affiliate with peninsular officialdom and to secure their local dominance within the sanction of Spanish law and institutions. As a result, after independence swept away the entrenched structure of Spanish authority there was no echelon of independent American politicians long versed in open, adversarial politics and the operation of representative government, nor was it clear who the “people” should be to constitute the basis of the emerging nations. Post-colonial politics, lacking well-defined and generally respected institutions, riven by conflicts of region, race, class, and ideology, and dominated by local caudillos, veered dangerously between anarchy and autocracy.33 In the British case, the homeland and the colonies were no less politically interrelated, though the results were quite different. The British-North American system in the ancien régime was based on a settler society dominated by creoles like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. Their predecessors had completely displaced the indigenous population and had produced several generations of sophisticated local politicians deeply versed in adversarial politics and allied to the political system in Britain though competitive with it. Office holding in British North America, it has been shown, was part of the patronage system at the heart of eighteenth-century British politics. The offices available in the colonies—from the most lucrative, like the major governorships, to the most petty, like tidewaiters in the minor ports—were within the gift of the patronage bosses in England and were distributed within the pressures of the system they managed. The Duke of Newcastle in the mid-eighteenth century could dispose of 85 offices in the colonies—invaluable assets in political in-fighting; by the 1770s the number of places in the gift of his successors was 226, and they were bestowed as benefits with an eye, not to the needs and interests of the colonists but to those of the factions in England these brokers served.34 But the influence of the British crown was minimal and the imperial bureaucracy was superficial, for the Anglo-American political system was in its essence a huge network of “informal connections ... mercantile, ecclesiastical, and ethnic interest groups that had corresponding ‘branches’ in London and the various colonies.”35 And Anglo-America's creole leaders were true politicians, competing openly for the benefits of government, supporting royal authority only when it suited them, challenging it when it was useful to do so, and working within representative institutions whose legitimacy was generally respected. When the light superstructure of royal government was eliminated, a group of able politicians, heirs to more than a century of political experience, took control with a minimum of upheaval and quickly created stable governments. The possible implications of pan-Atlantic politics seem endless. A series of deeply researched and ingenious studies on the early years of the first British empire argues that initially the whole system of colonial governance and the very definition of the first British empire, viewed in terms of its politics, can be understood as an extension of England's outport garrisons, military posts governed by army officers. “Nine-tenths of the royal provincial governors” appointed between 1660 and 1727 were officers rewarded for earlier services. Nine of the field officers under the Duke of Marlborough in a single battle, the great victory at Blenheim, in Bavaria, in 1704, were given gifts of North American governorships.36 For both British patronage bosses and Anglo-American politicians there was a single complex pan-Atlantic political system, stretching from the crown's Privy Council to the provincial assemblies in America. What happened at the heart of the British government mattered to provincial politicians in America. Fortunes were made, power was gained and lost, in America as in Britain by the twists and turns of factional politics in Britain—and even by the movement of power rivalries in western Europe. Until 1768 the executive head of colonial affairs was the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, and that department included in its concerns the whole of western Europe. The secretary's decisions with respect to the Western Hemisphere have been shown to have been a function of involvements in Paris, Madrid, and Vienna. There is no more revealing approach to the politics of Britain's Atlantic world than to trace the careers of aspiring American politicians as they sought their fortunes in the intricate political webs “at home.” Their difficulties in negotiating for positions at the heart of the system, and the seeming arbitrariness of appointments to colonial offices mark a fault line in the Anglo-American political world that would open into an unbridgeable fissure under the pressure of the revolutionary protests.37 In so many ways, then—in demographic, economic, and political history—the unit of discussion has broadened out to encompass the entire Atlantic basin. And the same can be said of intellectual history, especially in the late 18th century, when the ideas and aspirations of the European Enlightenment flowed freely among the intelligentsia of the entire Atlantic world, from Paris to Peru and from Italy to North Carolina. There were of course vast differences between the cultural life of western Europe and that of the Protestant British and the Catholic French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies. But recent writing has made clear that throughout the Western Hemisphere creole families, prosperous for three or four generations, well educated, increasingly sophisticated, were aware of the urges toward reform coursing through advanced circles in the metropolises, the impulses that would transform the political world in so much of western Europe. For the creole world this became an age of discovery—of self-discovery. Involved in a culture that “knew no Atlantic frontier,”38 they caught their own reflections in the mirror of Europe’s Enlightenment and saw the rich possibilities of life independent of Europe’s controls, free to embrace the exhilarating reform of their ancien régimes. The struggle for political reform would dominate the lives of people of both hemispheres for two generations, and would involve much conflict, bloodshed, and turmoil. But though in the end Americans north and south separated from the metropolitan states, there was no cultural dissociation. As Godechot and Palmer wrote, there never was a time when western Europe and the Americas were closer, more intimately parts of the same culture, than in the long era of the Enlightenment and of the years of struggle for independence throughout the Western Hemisphere. If Jefferson read Condillac, Buffon, D’Alembert, Helvetius, Mably, and Voltaire, so too did Simon Bolivar. Locke was important to the revolution in Venezuela, and Quesnay and Condillac to that in Argentina. Beccaria’s Of Crime and Punishment was a powerful force for the reform of criminal law and for the re-examination of what Franco Venturi called “the very centre of human society” no less—even more—in North America than it was in his native Milan, or in France, or in Spain.39 Directory: ~chambers ~chambers -> General Books A. McFarlane, The British in the Americas K. R. Andrews, Trade plunder and settlement David Cressy, Coming Over James Horn & Ida Altman, To make America: European migration in the early Modern period Marcus Hansen, Download 145.33 Kb. Share with your friends:
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